The Senate Ethics Committee began its discussion on the ethics complaint against Sen. Sonya Jaquez Lewis, D-Longmont, on Tuesday but appeared to take a dim view of how she responded to the complaints.

Last week, the committee released dozens of documents about the complaints against Jaquez Lewis, who was re-elected to her second and final term last November.

Included in that release: a 14-page response filed by the senator, who has been accused of abusive behavior against five legislative aides dating back to at least 2022.

While five former legislative aides are named in some of the documents, the first batch relates primarily to complaints from two aides.

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The two men’s complaint was sent on Nov. 15 to then-Senate President Steve Fenberg, D-Boulder; Senate President Pro tem James Coleman, D-Denver; and Senate Majority Leader Robert Rodriguez, D-Denver.

It provides a timeline, beginning in Dec. 2023 and extending through Nov. 15, 2024, about the problems the two experienced in Jaquez Lewis’ office.

Emails in 2024 by Fenberg also provided a second timeline, beginning in 2022.

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The aides filed a complaint under the General Assembly’s workplace expectations policy against Jaquez Lewis for “deceitful and unethical conduct toward employees in her office.”

That included requiring one of the aides to sign a nondisclosure agreement, which they pointed out is illegal under state law.

“[M]ismanagement of aides in her office is a pattern,” the two wrote. The senator’s behavior is “inappropriate and unacceptable as an elected official, especially given the lack of trust and transparency in her own office. This includes deliberately preventing junior aides from receiving sufficient training and connecting with other aides.”

The first aide, who formerly worked for Rep. Ruby Dickson, who resigned in Dec. 2023 citing a toxic environment in the House, was hired by Jaquez Lewis that same month, despite what he said were warnings from other aides about how Jaquez Lewis treated her aides.

He said he was asked to sign an NDA moments after arriving for his first day in her office. The General Assembly outlawed such agreements for governmental employees in a 2023 law.

The complaint said that in the 2024 session, Jaquez Lewis employed one senior aide, a junior aide, and two interns. The junior aide struggled to meet the senator’s expectations, which the complaint said was due to a lack of training, training that Jaquez Lewis refused to allow the aide to attend until late in the session when it was “too little, too late.”

The committee Tuesday primarily focused on the 14-page response submitted by Jaquez Lewis on Jan. 31.

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In their discussion Tuesday, committee Chair Sen. Julie Gonzales, D-Denver, said she found the senator’s response “striking and challenging.”

That pertained to Jaquez Lewis’ opening statement, in which she pointed to her 100% “commitment to union, labor, and working families.”

But she then attacked the complaint, which she said was “full of distortions and falsehoods and should never have been assigned to an Ethics Committee,” and focused on internal office management issues.

Jaquez Lewis claimed she was being scapegoated “and dragged through the mud for political ends” by the Political Workers Guild legislative aides’ union, which she claimed was using the complaints to gain better pay and collective bargaining rights from the legislature.

Sen. Dylan Roberts, D-Frisco, noted that when the complaints became public in November and December of last year, Jaquez Lewis herself publicly asked for an ethics investigation. He said her statement that it shouldn’t have gone to an ethics committee was “jarring.”

The response appears to shift from the complaint not being real to being an artificial way for PWG to seek more rights and pay and then flip to get into specifics on the complaints. “It’s hard to tell what direction she’s going in,” Roberts said.

According to Sen. Mike Weissman, D-Aurora, the claims that some of the allegations are defamatory and insinuations against Fenberg are also concerning.

Gonzales said she was hoping to see a response from the senator that documented how she’s changed since the first complaint surfaced. That could be something like “here are the steps I’ve proactively taken to change behavior,” but that’s not in her answer, Gonzales said. Instead, Jaquez Lewis claimed it was a roundabout way for the union to obtain collective bargaining.

In the closing of her response, Jaquez Lewis said she fundraised to pay every intern, that she’s paid her legislative aides extra, above their salary, and that she takes full responsibility for the running of her office and management of office staff.

However, Roberts also raised the potential for impact from the publication of her response, which he said would be read by their colleagues, legislative aides, and the public.

He noted that the response doesn’t contain any kind of apology. The senator has a right to dispute the allegations and provide a justification, but “there’s no denying that multitude of aides feel victimized for a variety of allegations.”